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WordPress Scare Is Over For Now

This morning I notified several of my blogging friends that ny host country had blocked access to WordPress. This has happened several times in the past, but only for a few hours at time. I thought this time is was going to be permanent. It now appears that after 24 hours, the block has been removed. I can’t tell you the anger I was feeling.

Several of you e-mailed me offering help and/or suggestions. Thank you so much! Let’s hope this doesn’t become a habit here on the shores of the Sea of Happiness.

Specials thanks to John, Pat, and Bunker. You guys are the greatest!

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23 thoughts on “WordPress Scare Is Over For Now”

I’ve always thought you live in Venezuela. Some time back, it stopped showing up in my WordPress country stats after you left comments. I just thought it was because you were protecting your personal privacy. Perhaps it is them, not you who hide your country of origin.

It could be that, rather than being blocked, your site is occasionally victimized by technical networking incompetence in your neck of the woods. Intermittence suggests that could be the problem.

The speed of the Net is largely due to data mirroring and sending tiny mini-chunks of data flowing through a misty cloud of router IP addresses. If something happens to the cloud of IP addresses or intervening mirroring sites where data flows from then your site becomes effectively non-existent.

In those cases it would just look like your web address didn’t exist. When the problem is fixed then your site suddenly reappears as if it had never been gone in the first place.

This is great news Jim! I had WordPress suspend my account for a little while not to long ago due to a mistake and I was panicked, I can’t even imagine what you were feeling when the government shut you down! Glad you are back!

Thanks for the offer, AOW. It looks like we are back in business here , at least for a while. Pat Salttery has suggested I move my blog to a server in the US. I don’t know what is envolved< but I am going to investigate.

Sorry to hear about your internet problems. Since I work with WordPress, I can offer a little of my knowledge for your consideration.

In case you didn’t know, there are two WordPress services. You are using WordPress.com as a complete service of software plus hosting. The “other” WordPress is WordPress.org which is the core WordPress page, and is all about the WordPress software package.

I build independent web sites using the WordPress software package from WordPress.org because it is one of the best web software platforms in the world. About 17% of ALL the web sites in the world are built using this software. It is reliable, easy to use, and almost infinitely flexible.You can customize it or change the code anyway you like. It is one of the largest and most successful open source software communities in the world.

You are using the WordPress.com service, which includes a very limited edition of the software package, and their free hosting service. I use this service for my blog because I am not interested in fancy or flexible themes, just in basic, reliable hosting. As you know, there are hundreds of thousands of blogs and web sites that are hosted by WordPress.com.

My reason for all this description is that you might want local hosting to get around some of the problems you have been having, while still using the acknowledged best blogging software in the world. I don’t know what would happen if you Google for WordPress user groups in your country, but it is possible that you could find somebody to help for free.in setting up a new site. Porting you existing content is fairly easy.

Finding a free world class hosting service like WordPress.com would likely be the problem..

The answer is, yes. I use a company called Bluehost.com, and have used Justhost.com. they are owned by the same company as ipage.com and a host of other consumer grade hosting companies 🙂 They all will install the WordPress software for you, including the data base. Costs run around $4 to $5 per month, usually paid a year at a time. Most of these companies will sell you a domain name costing $12 to $15 per year for a dotCom domain. Bluehost has very good customer service, and Justhost uses the same data centers with the same technicians for their customer service. I learned this by accident.

There is a local Atlanta guy that owns CllickHost.com, and he charges about $5.00 per month. He is a member of the local WordPress group, and seems to cater somewhat to WordPress users.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available, many of them being free. The software itself is free, and most hosting companies will install it for free. You can check with your new hosting company during the interview stage to see if they will help you move your blogging content to the new site. It is not a really big deal.

Hope I have been of some help. I believe you have my email address. Email me for any other information you need.

WordPress was started by a young man named Matthew Mullenweg from Houston, Texas. He is still in his twenties, and is in the free software business. WordPress is an open source project similar to Linux and dozen’s of other popular and successful packages. Matthew started a separate company, Automattic, to monetize his products and that is where WordPress.com hosting came from. The basic stuff is free, but as you probably noticed, add-ons cost money, including the ability to customize your blog or web site. By the way, there are many commercial web sites being hosted for free on WordPress.com.

The software obtainable on WordPress.org is almost infinitely customizable, and a very large community has grown up around the package, contributing modules, themes, and patches.

I met Mullenweg at a party last year, and was impressed that his driving philosophy is to make the software easy to use for the end user. This explains the popularity of the package, and its worldwide usage.

As you can tell, I am a really big fan of WordPress. However, I am a fan of another package called, Drupal. Both packages are called, Content Management Systems because the aim is to make the content of your web site manageable. Picture a site with thousands of web pages. Both WordPress and Drupal make sites like this manageable. It doesn’t take a technician to add, delete, or modify content.

Here in Atlanta, Georgia State University recently moved their 37,000 pages of web sites to WordPress. The basic work was done by a few technicians, and the users themselves moved their existing content to the new system. This is what is achievable with free software, today.